RALEIGH – I’d like to be able to claim credit for a colossal, unprecedented feat of public-relations hocus pocus. That would be quite a rush. Unfortunately, the facts would not bear out such a claim.
Not that facts are an impediment to some. Which brings me to Jim Protzman and his allegation that the Raleigh News & Observer has become a mouthpiece for conservatism in general and the John Locke Foundation in particular. Protzman, a former member of the Chapel Hill Town Council and strategic director for the Raleigh public-relations firm CapStrat, is the main founder of a blog site, BlueNC, for progressive Democrats. While the site itself is worth an occasional glance, for those wanting a sense of what some North Carolina Democratic activists are thinking about and working on, Protzman’s contributions (under the nom de plume “Anglico”) border on self-parody.
His rules of composition aren’t hard to fathom. Just describe everything as a conspiracy, hatched by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney or, in North Carolina, JLF board member Art Pope. In the latter case, use the term “millionaire” and “puppetmaster” at every opportunity (a practice strikingly similar to what Rep. Richard Morgan, a Pope rival, has been simultaneously urging his political allies to do, according to memos discovered as part of recent State Board of Elections hearings – memos that also contained effusive praise from Protzman’s CapStrat boss to Morgan). Also, say that those with whom you disagree cannot just be mistaken but must be actively villainous, wringing their hands in some dark corner of C. Montgomery Burns’ palatial estate.
Oh, and pepper up all these pathetic excuses for argument with profanity. Lots of profanity. That makes flimsy allegations valid. Plus, insult people’s appearance, intelligence, religious faith, and family members (living and dead). That demonstrates one’s virility.
For younger staffers and interns at JLF, I urge them not to waste too much time reading and laughing at Protzman’s ravings. They do have actual work to do. But I admit that it can be educational to scan just enough to learn how not to engage in public-policy discourse. I urge a similar cautionary-tale approach to reading the likes of Ann Coulter, whose vitriolic nonsense illustrates the dangerous temptations of face time and book sales.
With regard to Protzman’s claim of a pro-JLF bias at the N&O, however, a response is necessary – not simply because it has been propagated among a few progressive activists, or because it has any chance of meeting the giggle test, but because N&O public editor Ted Vaden chose to highlight the allegation in his Sunday column. I understood why Vaden made the decision – after all, the professional judgment and fairness of the newspaper were being challenged. The resulting column did slap down Protzman’s initial comparison, which wasn’t hard as it was patently absurd (he had compared the number of citations of JLF, a multi-million-dollar operation employing 28 full-time-equivalent positions, to the citations of NC Policy Watch, until recently a one-man operation headed by my friend and colleague, Chris Fitzsimon).
Unfortunately, Vaden did not discuss Protzman’s subsequent claims that 1) a broader analysis of N&O coverage, including more left-of-center groups, nevertheless demonstrated a conservative tilt in the newspaper’s sourcing; and 2) my hometown paper, The Charlotte Observer, was less vulnerable to my devilish charms than the naïve little N&O.
Neither claim stands up to serious scrutiny. To take the second one first, the N&O is the capital-city newspaper. It provides far more daily coverage of state government, the legislature, state politics, and public-policy debate than any other paper in the state does. It quotes all the various think tanks and policy groups a lot more than the Observer does. Moreover, much of our newspaper coverage is related to the dozens of events that JLF hosts each year. Most of these events are in Raleigh. The Charlotte Observer is unlikely to post announcements of regular events in Raleigh. Also, the sun also rises in the east, and 2+2=4.
As for Protzman’s “broader” analysis, the most charitable way I can put this is that I could not replicate his findings, which in any case should have struck informed readers as highly improbable. He wrote that he used two sources for news mentions: newspaper archives and Google. The latter choice was puzzling, unnecessary, and yielded results ridiculous on their face (2,488 mentions of JLF in the N&O, for example). Using the N&O’s archives, on Sunday I ran a series of 12-month searches on mentions of a range of right-of-center and left-of-center public-policy groups in North Carolina:
Right-of-Center: JLF (including its affiliated centers and projects), Civitas Institute, N.C. Family Policy Council, Americans for Prosperity-NC, Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.
Left-of-Center: N.C. Justice Center (including its affiliated centers and projects), N.C. Policy Watch, Common Sense Foundation, Democracy North Carolina, Institute for Southern Studies, N.C. Center for Public Policy Research, N.C. Child Advocacy Institute, Public School Forum, N.C. Housing Coalition, N.C. Public Interest Research Group, N.C. Center for Voter Education.
The results are as follows. In sheer numbers, the left-of-center groups received 190 mentions while the right-of-center groups received 157 mentions. But because there are fewer independent, nonprofit research groups on the center-right than there are on the center-left, the distributions within each group are dissimilar. On the Right, JLF accounted for 87 of the 157 mentions. On the Left, the group most comparable to JLF, the N.C. Justice Center, had about half as many mentions, 44. The remaining 146 mentions by left-of-center groups were a little more than double the remaining non-JLF mentions on the Right (70).
The difference in the lists isn’t evidence of a selection bias – I’d welcome suggestions of comparable think tanks or policy-research groups that I may have forgotten – but is rather evidence of a difference in structure. JLF is a multi-divisional organization that conducts research, operates outreach projects and training programs, publishes a newspaper and suite of websites, produces radio and TV shows, participates in the production of other broadcasts, and hosts seminars, luncheons, and conferences on matters ranging from history, the arts, and philosophy to state government, tax policy, national politics, and international affairs. On the Left, many of these endeavors are also carried out, but by separate groups. In economics terms, you might say that JLF is an example of both horizontal and vertical integration. To yield useful comparisons, you have to take that into account, probably by focusing on aggregate counts rather than those of specific institutes. (In the aggregate, by the way, the center-left institutions have more staffing and funding than the center-right institutions, or at least they did the last time I checked. But that’s a topic for another day, as is the role that other groups such as campus-based research institutes and grassroots lobbies play in the policy debate.)
I used the term “sheer numbers” to describe the comparison because simple quantitative analysis has some obvious flaws. For one thing, newspaper mentions vary widely in length, prominence, and character. In JLF’s case, for example, many of the mentions consist of a sentence or two announcing an upcoming speaker. Some are letters to the editor from people blasting us, which hardly seems likely to be part of my dastardly scheme. Some are quotes from JLF analysts on issues they track. And, yes, some are stories devoted substantially to the release of a JLF report, though frankly not many. To develop a more rigorous comparison of how the N&O covers a range of public-policy institutions, you would have to delve more deeply into qualitative assessments. (As I recall it, I learned the fundamentals of media content analysis in a J-school class taught by the brilliant Dr. Jane Brown, who happens to be Protzman’s wife. Ironies abound.)
And you’d have to avoid certain other pitfalls – such as indulging in paranoid fantasy and misusing Google searches.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.